JSON Escape and Unescape Online

What JSON escaping does

A JSON string is text between double quotes, and a few characters cannot appear inside it literally. JSON escaping rewrites them with a backslash so the value survives being embedded in a JSON document, a log line, an environment variable or source code:

The forward slash may be written \/ but never has to be; this tool leaves it alone, as JSON.stringify does.

Escape: JSONify a string or encode JSON

The Escape / Stringify tab runs the input through JSON.stringify. With Wrap in quotes on you get a complete JSON string literal — this is what “JSONify string” means: a two-line note becomes "line one\nline two", ready to drop into a JSON file or API request body. Turn it off to get just the escaped inner text for pasting between quotes you already have.

Tick Minify JSON first to JSON encode a document: if the input is valid JSON it is minified and then encoded as a string, so {"a": "b"} becomes "{\"a\":\"b\"}". Text that is not JSON is encoded as a plain string, and the status line says which happened. Escape non-ASCII writes every character above U+007F as \uXXXX for ASCII-only transports.

Unescape: unstringify and decode nested JSON

The Unescape / Parse tab reverses the process with JSON.parse. Paste "{\"a\":1}" and you get back {"a":1}; paste text without the surrounding quotes, such as line one\nline two, and it is treated as the inside of a string. This is how to read JSON that was stored as an escaped string inside a log, a database column or another JSON document.

• Decode nested levels: values are sometimes stringified two or three times ("\"{\\\"a\\\":1}\""). The JSON decoder keeps parsing while the result is itself a JSON string that holds JSON, up to ten levels, and reports how many it removed.
• Pretty-print JSON result: when the decoded value is an object or array it is shown indented; otherwise you see the plain text with real line breaks.

Multiline JSON

The Multiline JSON tab parses JSON (unwrapping a stringified value if needed) and re-serialises it with one property per line, indented by 2 spaces, 4 spaces or a tab — handy when a compact API response has to be readable in a pull request or documentation page. Invalid JSON is reported with the parser’s error message. If you actually need a multiline string inside JSON, use Escape: raw line breaks are not allowed in JSON strings, so each becomes \n.

Worked example

Input text:     She said "hi"
                C:\temp
Escaped:        "She said \"hi\"\nC:\\temp"
Encoded JSON:   {"id": 7}  ->  "{\"id\":7}"
Unstringified:  "{\"id\":7}"  ->  {"id": 7}

Escaping JSON in code

// JavaScript
JSON.stringify('She said "hi"\n');           // '"She said \\"hi\\"\\n"'
JSON.parse('"She said \\"hi\\"\\n"');        // 'She said "hi"\n'
JSON.stringify(JSON.stringify({ id: 7 }));   // '"{\\"id\\":7}"'  (JSON encode)

# Python
import json
json.dumps('She said "hi"\n')                # '"She said \\"hi\\"\\n"'
json.loads(json.loads(double_encoded))     # decode two levels

Common questions